Social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, are very widely used today. Social networking allows the building of online communities of people who share similar interests or backgrounds. Each user of a web based social networking site maintains their own profile. Social networking sites provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail, instant messaging, posting text to the profiles of other users, blogging on their own profiles, etc.
As social networking sites have become more popular, spam-profiles (sprofs) have become a problem. A sprof is a fake social networking site profile that is created to direct viewers to an off-domain site, either to expose the users to the off-domain site, or to increase search engine or other rankings of the off-domain site. More specifically, a sprof can attempt to direct viewers to a site associated with the sprof to promote the site, to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of the site, to artificially inflate paid advertisement impressions from visitors, and/or to get a new site indexed. These sprof associated, off-domain sites can be commercial and/or pornographic in nature. Additionally, these sites can install malicious code on the computers of viewers. The direction of the viewer of the sprof to the off-domain site can be direct (i.e., viewing the sprof navigates the viewer to the off-domain site) or indirect (the sprof contains one or more links to the off target site). Note that a sprof is not a legitimate profile of a bona fide member of a social network, but instead is a dummy profile, which is simply used to entice the viewer to navigate to an off-domain site.
A related problem that manifests itself on social networks is spam-blogs (splogs), which are similar in nature to sprofs. A splog is an artificially created blog, which is used to promote associated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. Splogs typically contain at least one implicit or explicit link to a site associated with the splog creator. Such splog associated sites are often disreputable, malicious or at best useless. Some splogs attempt to replicate themselves by posting their content, including the links to off-domain sites, to other user profiles.
Techniques can be used to attempt detect sprofs and splogs within a social network environment. However, conventional methods for detecting sprofs and splogs are subject to false positives. It would be desirable to address these issues.